baby, can i hold you tonight
by birdbox
Summary: Toby notices the way Happy sleeps. He finds it interesting. Toby/Happy - established relationship


((Toby/Happy, established relationship. I experimented a little bit with my writing style in this so I hope it still makes sense.))

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><p><strong>baby, can i hold you tonight<strong>

For a woman who makes a point of being bold and brash to the point of aggressive when conscious, Toby notices very quickly that Happy takes up as little room as physically possible when she sleeps. Body turned sideways and facing out of the bed, close to the mattress edge, legs curled up close to her stomach, with her arms tucked in and her hands resting on opposite shoulders. It's interesting.

("Shared a lot of beds in foster homes," she murmurs to him sleepily when he wonders why out loud. No sharp retort about shrinking her out after sex which sort of surprises him. Maybe because she's so used to his fascination with the human condition, or because she's just too sleepy to bother. "Bigger kids'd push me out if I took up too much space. Now go to sleep, asshole."

"The term of endearment you chose just there is _very_ telling you know," Toby tells her.

He hears a snicker, then -almost instantaneously- soft snoring. Toby smiles, reaches over her carefully to switch the bedside lamp off and drops a light kiss to her cheekbone.)

As for the two of them sleeping together in the innocent sense of the word, well… a complete stranger could spend five minutes with Happy and they'd probably guess that she isn't the _let's-spoon-and-cuddle-and-make-pillow-talk _type. So Toby isn't surprised that they spend the early part of their relationship just passing out next to each other, or that he usually wakes up to find empty sheets next to him. Toby meanwhile has been known to enjoy a cuddle in bed from time to time in the past but where Happy is concerned, he'll take what he can get and be grateful for it.

(Plus, the sex part before the passing out part is pretty damned fantastic, so it's swings and roundabouts really.)

Life marches on. They help catch bad guys, Toby loses many a wonderful hat to various dangerous missions, it's Happy that takes Toby to the monster trucks rally in the end— oh, and there's a few near death experiences thrown in there for good measure.

Toby gets shot. It might be a stupid thought to have while you're in danger of bleeding out but Toby can't deny he's a little gratified by how panicked Happy gets, insulting him graphically, profusely and in languages he's never even heard before for stepping in front of her when he saw the gunman.

"I'm not taking anything you say personally," Toby says to her, smiling weakly and wincing as she presses her plaid over-shirt into his abdomen. "I know it's an expression of your love and concern for me."

Happy shakes her head angrily as blood soaks through the fabric of his white t-shirt (wrong colour choice for today apparently) and her shirt, swearing even more coarsely in response. The EMTs and police arrive shortly after—the gunman has been pressed face first into the floor by Cabe since a few seconds after he fired the gun.

Toby doesn't process much clearly after that, EMTs blurring around him and loading him onto a stretcher and into the back of an ambulance but he does hear clearly Happy's curt answer when an EMT asks her what relation she is to him.

"I'm his girlfriend." It's the first time she's called herself his girlfriend or even come close to any sort of label on what they have. Again, there's a time and a place for being pleased about such a relationship development which very arguably is not right now, but it still warms the bones of him while he bleeds into the sterilised gauze that's replaced Happy's shirt.

As luck would have it, Mr Gunman wasn't the best marksman in the world: the bullet went in somewhere near his appendix so he was never in any real danger but the wound still looks pretty badass even if Toby does say so himself. He's back at home less than a week later, on orders to take it easy.

The team gives him a new custom hat for his collection with a small gold bullet casing on the rim as a get well soon present to remind him of his 'triumph in the face of death' as the accompanying card over-dramatically puts it. It's too sentimental and creative and well-thought-out to be anyone's but Paige's doing with the rest of them chipping in money to pay for it but he thanks them all sincerely.

Happy stays over a lot at his for a while after he's tells him this is only because her shower coincidentally broke down and she's waiting for the water company to fix it.

They both know this is a flagrant lie—as though she couldn't fix a simple shower problem far better and faster than any poxy water company engineer could but Toby says nothing, because he likes having her over so they can play video games and eat ice cream at frankly inappropriate times of night but also because he knows he'd be the same and worse if the situations were reversed. He knows the whole shooting incident scared her more than she lets on.

He knows this because her sleeping positions change. The first night he spends at home, he's almost asleep when the mattress shifts on her side of the bed and a soft pressure comes to rest on the side of his ribcage. Happy's hand snakes around him to rest on the gauze of his taped up wound, stroking lighter than a butterfly's wing. She doesn't move away even she she falls asleep herself.

Toby wakes up to her curled around his back, hand still resting protectively where he was shot. Maybe he's still dreaming, or maybe it's the powerful pain meds he's dosed up on but he could swear he feels her press a kiss to his shoulder blade before she carefully leaves the bed as well. Which he's tempted to point out to her actually means she's just spooned with him before being non-sexually intimate with him in bed—not something he ever expected from Happy Quinn. But as far as she knows, he's dead to the world in a medication-induced sleep so he settles for internal satisfaction instead.

(Even once the gauze goes and the bullet wound becomes an angry patch of red skin, Happy's hand always ends up resting over it every night, her small body pressed up against his back. Toby pretends he doesn't notice the sudden change but he still smiles into the darkness when she curls herself around him each night.)

And after Happy stays over that first night back from the hospital, she doesn't really leave. By the time their first anniversary is on the horizon, they're more or less living together. For two people with a incredible amount of combined neuroses, the whole thing works pretty well. He's the neat freak to her organised chaos existence, and she can cook reasonably well while he burns everything and has a endless stream of take away menus in his drawer. It works out pretty well.

He gets back one night from drinking with Walter and Sylvester in the dead of winter to his –rather,_ their_- dark apartment. The ground outside is almost frozen solid and the lack of cloud cover means his skin is almost frozen too from walking home in a thin jacket and t-shirt. He creeps into the bedroom and strips as quietly as he can, slipping in next to Happy and trying not to jostle the bed too much even though he's shivering because he's fucking freezing.

It doesn't work. Happy wakes, briefly, to mutter: "You're fucking freezing."

This complaint, however, does not stop her shifting over to him and subsequently falling back to sleep on top of him, his cold flesh pressed against hers. She's like a tiny furnace under the covers which definitely helps with his own temperature. Toby's arms wrap around her of their own accord and that's the last thing he remembers.

(When he wakes up the next morning, she's still there—sleeping peacefully on top of him, ear directly over his heart, hand resting over the wound on his abdomen. Toby just smiles, pulls the covers over her bare shoulder and drifts off himself.)


End file.
